2.4.7 + VIA Pro266 + 2xUltraTx2 lockups

2.4.7 + VIA Pro266 + 2xUltraTx2 lockups

[Robin Humble]

Are there any known issues with kernel 2.4.7 and VIA pro266 chipsets?

Under high PCI load we're getting repeatable complete system freezes
when accessing two PCI IDE controller cards at the same time... even
the magic sysrq key doesn't work. It's a ASUS cuv266 motherboard which
has a VIA vt8633/vt8233 chipset (Apollo Pro266) with a 1GHz P3 and 512M
of DDR ram.
  http://www.asus.com/products/Motherboard/ddr266/cuv266/index.html
We have two Promise Ultra100 Tx2 IDE controller cards with four 75G
ibm disks on each (8 ibm disks total). We also have a 40G ATA100
Maxtor disk for the OS on the on-board IDE controller.

We've tried kernel 2.4.7 plus the ide.2.4.7-p3.all.07092001.patch from
www.linux-ide.org (required to recognise the Tx2 cards), and with a cvs
2.4.7+XFS kernel with the same ide patch (kgcc was used to compile both
of these), and also with a stock RedHat 7.1 update kernel 2.4.3-12.
They all freeze in the same way.

A test that involves hammering 4 drives on one of the Tx2 cards with
four bonnie++'s works just fine, but running a few bonnies on each
card (making both Tx2 cards work at the same time) causes a freeze
within about a minute - this is very repeatable. A raid5 resync over
the 8 disks causes a fast freeze also. There are no IRQ conflicts and
moving the Tx2 cards to different slots doesn't help.

Note that using the same controllers and drives and all the same
tests except on a motherboard with a BX chipset (Pentium3/450 +
RedHat kernel 2.4.3-12) works without any problems at all.

So the system is stable when driving a single Tx2 card, or on a BX,
but just not two Tx2's together on the pro266 board :-/ So it's
perhaps (I'm guessing here :) a non-trivial Tx2 driver bug or maybe a
VIA Pro266 problem?

Let me know if you want more details or want us to try out anything.

Please CC me in any replies as I'm not subscribed... ta.

cheers,
robin

Re: 2.4.7 + VIA Pro266 + 2xUltraTx2 lockups

[Barry K. Nathan]

> Are there any known issues with kernel 2.4.7 and VIA pro266 chipsets?

I'm having lockups too, mainly during access to disks on the onboard AMI
IDE RAID, but I've had other lockups too. I'm having the lockups under
both 2.4.7 and 2.2.19/20pre7. This is on an Iwill DVD266-R, dual
1GHz PIII. I'm not getting these lockups under Win2K.

This is a stab in the dark, but does putting "noapic" on the boot
command line help? (I haven't tested this enough to see if it really
works.)

-Barry K. Nathan <barryn@pobox.com>

Re: 2.4.7 + VIA Pro266 + 2xUltraTx2 lockups

[Alan Cox]

> So the system is stable when driving a single Tx2 card, or on a BX,
> but just not two Tx2's together on the pro266 board :-/ So it's
> perhaps (I'm guessing here :) a non-trivial Tx2 driver bug or maybe a
> VIA Pro266 problem?

Firstly please try 2.4.6-ac5 as that has the proper VIA workaround for their
bridge bugs. Its useful to rule out the very conservative approach the older
kernels use to avoid the disk corruption problem they had

Alan

Re: 2.4.7 + VIA Pro266 + 2xUltraTx2 lockups

[Robin Humble]

Alan Cox wrote:
>Robin Humble wrote:
>> So the system is stable when driving a single Tx2 card, or on a BX,
>> but just not two Tx2's together on the pro266 board :-/ So it's
>> perhaps (I'm guessing here :) a non-trivial Tx2 driver bug or maybe a
>> VIA Pro266 problem?
>
>Firstly please try 2.4.6-ac5 as that has the proper VIA workaround for their
>bridge bugs. Its useful to rule out the very conservative approach the older
>kernels use to avoid the disk corruption problem they had

Ok. That locked up in the same way unfortunately :-/
Also a 2.4.8-pre1-xfs that I just tried...
I tried the "noapic" option as suggested in another email and that
didn't change anything either.

We've moved all the disks and controllers to a BX m/b machine for now, but
if there's anything else you want us to be guinea pigs for them we'll be
happy to try it out on the VIA Pro266 machine.
One other odd thing is that I have yet to make the CUV266 board see any
devices on its built-in secondary IDE controller. I have no idea why that
could be... The BIOS just doesn't detect them. Might that be a related
problem? Perhaps it's a faulty motherboard? Seems unlikely.

Please CC me on any replies as I'm not subscribed... ta...

cheers,
robin